Was just another day in the WFNX circle pit, had a bunch of new tracks lined up for a slew of shows around town the next few days, and then BAM! -- SPEEDY ORTIZ just rolls up to WFNX to say hey. They're at T.T. The Bear's tonight for the Infinity Girl EP release party, (which we covered yesterday like whoa), so we chatted about what's up in Western Mass and spun some tracks from their end of the state.

Happy Thursday, where today on Accents we spotlighted two shows this weekend at the Middle East, yelled about a whole bunch of ragtime, figured out which words we can never spell properly, and opened the show with three straight songs by the same artist. No rules radio, Boston style. Here's what we heard...

In my five years of covering the hip-hop scene here, this is truly the most severe dilemma that I've ever faced. Click the group name for my recent Boston Phoenix features on these acts, and click the venue name for ticket info...

No, Phoenix circulation manager Mike Awesome isn't gay for Cute Is What We Aim For. But he did serve time as their roadie, which is why we're now able to satiate the dreams of 16-year-old girls everywhere by providing these up-close-and-personal shots of the band taken on stage, backstage, and on the bus, taken over the weekend at their sold-out show at Middle East downstairs. 20 more shots after the jump >>>

If we had a Best Music Poll category for most-improved, Mike Fiore's FACES ON FILM would've had another notch in their belt, not to mention a pretty-much unimpeded cakewalk to the victory. As it is, he's up for best local singer-songwriter, for which we apologize because we didn't know quite where else to put 'em.

The last time we tried to shoot Viva Viva, we made an ill-fated foray into infrared photography. This time, with the addition of actual lights, you may even be able to make out more than a Sasquatch-like outline. Which is good, because we love these dudes. Forget that VV grew out of two of our favorite early-00s bands -- the Lot Six and Officer May -- or that they've got this awesome Mutt-and-Jeff thing going on.

Sure, it was only two songs. (Turns out they had a third ready to go, but decided against it. What, the applause wasn't loud enough? "Exactly," said Chris Brokaw.) But since this was the first time Come have performed since their 2 1/2-hour farewell gig at the MidEast's downstairs room back in -- what, 1998? -- well, this was pretty fucking rad.

Isis, "Not In Rivers, But In Drops (Live at the Middle East, 11/4/2007)"

Hard to believe it's been ten years since Aaron Turner started Isis -- and eight years since we wrote this. Back then, Aaron was still at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, his LP sleeves were redefining the aesthetics of metal, Isis had released all of one EP (on Escape Artist, a label then-Relapse publicist Gordon Conrad had formed specifically to put out the Isis demo), and Hydrahead was home to Cave In and Converge.

Damon & Naomi are calling their current tour “The Roaring Silence Revue,” a reference to the combination of their own subdued-but-steely folk sound and the deep-bass noise-rock of their tourmates, Japanese trio Boris. D&N are working their new Within These Walls (20/20/20), and even though their first CD after the breakup of Galaxie 500 was called More Sad Hits, this might be the saddest yet, inspired, they say, by a year of digging into Frank Sinatra and the weepiest albums of his that they could find — Only the Lonely and No One Cares

Damon & Naomi are calling their current tour “The Roaring Silence Revue,” a reference to the combination of their own subdued-but-steely folk sound and the deep-bass noise-rock of their tourmates, Japanese trio Boris. D&N are working their new Within These Walls (20/20/20), and even though their first CD after the breakup of Galaxie 500 was called More Sad Hits, this might be the saddest yet, inspired, they say, by a year of digging into Frank Sinatra and the weepiest albums of his that they could find — Only the Lonely and No One Cares

New suits, new ’staches, new songs — same old vaudevillian showmanship,
same old mathematically precise eardrum molestation. At a sweaty, stinky,
crushd-tin-box (sorry, we still have Radiohead on the brain) Middle East
downstairs last night the Hives lived up to Howlin’ Pelle’s ridiculous
tongue-in-cheek third-person boasts — as they always do, even if the shtick
starts to wear thin somewhere around two-thirds of the way in.